Posted in Europe, Patents at 5:12 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Photo from the European Commission
Summary: EPO staff is demonstrating against abuse by the management of the EPO, today we well as in prior days
THOSE who have not been paying close attention over the weekend may wish to read yesterday's article about Benoît Battistelli, who last week was reported to have ousted yet another regulator (once again in his very aggression-filled and abrupt fashion). Battistelli is trying to oust his opposition quicker than any opposition is able to take him down. It is a classic sign of collapse and misery — the acts of fallen tyrant. Staff is trying to seek help from the outside (European authorities and anti-corruption groups) and it does so anonymously for fear of retribution. Those who do this publicly under their own name are being tossed out.
“The background,” explained our source, “is that two colleagues currently face disciplinary measures for their activity as members of the Internal Appeals Committee although persons carrying out such duties are protected against such measures.” This may relate to what we covered some days ago. Battistelli and his cronies are totally out of control. “It is simply another example of an abuse of power of EPO president Benoît Battistelli,” explained our source.
Today there is another demonstration going on if all goes as planned. The EPO flyer (pamphlet) is joined by an open letter to the Administrative Council. This is the second demonstration in December alone (EPO staff has been marching in protests for years now, for one reason or another, usually the extension of patent scope, as outlined below).
The documents included herein were distributed to EPO staff this morning (via private E-mail addresses) and this was the text of the message:
Dear colleagues,
Please find enclosed EPO-FLIER No. 13 – The spirit of the regulations
It comes together with an Open Letter to the Administrative Council dated 5 December.
If you are not on strike today, it would be good if you could bring a few copies to the Office in order to enhance the oil-spill-effect.
Many thanks for your support!
With our best regards,
The EPO-FLIER team
For completeness we include below the text of these documents, as they also help explain the nature of the abuse and reasons for dissatisfaction. █
Full text (flyer #1)
Aurélien Pétiaud (Munich, FR) and Michael Lund (The Hague, DK) are members of the EPO’s Internal Appeal Committee nominated by the Central Staff Committee. They have highlighted the deficits in the legal protection of EPO employees with means at their disposal, namely IAC opinions and appeals filed by members of the IAC. This is interpreted as misconduct by the president, who is threatening the two with disciplinary measures, in Aurélien’s case with dismissal.
The restrictive policies used and abused have been introduced by Benoît Battistelli (FR) with the consent of the Administrative Council, chaired by Jesper Kongstad (DK).
The Demonstration on 2 December 2014 organised by SUEPO TH gives us the opportunity to show solidarity with our colleagues. It starts at 11:00 h at the French Embassy and comprises a march to the Danish Embassy. It ends at about 12:30 hrs. Munich is simultaneously marching to the Palace of Justice to show the public what goes on in an international organisation in the heart of Europe
in the 21st century – under the knowing eyes of the governments of the Member States. It starts at 13:00 hrs in front of PH 8.
“With the slogan “Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité”, the French revolution started a long-lasting and difficult development to today’s understanding of human rights. A European organization must set an example of the principles of democracy and freedom of opinion.“
(Zimmermann & Partner, November 2014, http://www.zimpat.com/en/strike/page.html )
We have nothing to add to that, other than thanking them for so clearly voicing their support. Come and voice your dissatisfaction with the prevailing management by fear and intimidation!
Full text (flyer #2)
8 December 2014
EPO FLIIER No. 13
The EPO-FLIER wants to provide staff with uncensored, independent information at times of social conflict.
The spirit of the regulations
“We are not here trying to build a reform which is compatible with each of your nation’s, with each of your state’s law. We are trying to build something which is useful for the Office, for the Organisation. So, if in some cases, it is not compatible with the German law, or the UK law, or the French law, this is not the issue. The issue is: is it useful for the Organisation?” 1
This statement of the president raises a number of questions:
1. If Mr Battistelli thinks that a (career) reform does NOT need to comply with national law, does he take care that it respects any other (labour) law standard, such as the European Convention on Human Rights, or conventions of the International Labour Organization?
There is no evidence that he does.
Modern democracies usually work by the rule according to a higher law. It means that no law may be enforced unless it conforms with certain universal (written or unwritten) principles of fairness, morality, and justice 2.
Mr Battistelli does not see a need to respect this general rule 3:
During the past two years, the president has repeatedly demonstrated that he respects no standards other than his own. He has managed to win the delegations over to support regulations which can only survive in the context of the Office’s immunity 4. He undertakes a structural dismantling of legal recourse. He introduced investigation guidelines that would have made Securitate, Stasi or NSA happy. He undermined the right to freedom of association. When the president introduced the strike regulations, he showed that international conventions ratified by the Member States do not count. He muzzles unions and staff representatives. He abuses powers to discipline dissenting voices 5. He shows a complete disregard for (even unanimous) opinions of the Internal Appeals Committee or the Disciplinary Committees by passing harsher judgment than recommended 4, 6. He repeatedly demonstrated that neither the letter nor the spirit of the Service Regulations count 7. This applies to those parts of the regulations he inherited and even to those he wrote himself 8.
______ 1 Mr Battistelli, commenting on the career reform during the BFC meeting on 20 November 2014 2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_According_to_Higher_Law 3 SOCIAL CONFLICT AT THE EUROPEAN PATENT OFFICE, http://www.suepo.org/public/su14294cp.pdf 4 EPO-FLIER No. 8 – Balancing views, Annex: “Des Sonnenkönigs neue Kleider” 5 http://www.worldipreview.com/news/epo-suspends-former-committee-member-7363 6 Letter of Union Syndicale Fédérale to the Administrative Council’s chairman (21.03.2014), http://suepo.org/public/su14076cp.pdf 7 Communiqué No. 41 and IFLRE strike notification, www.suepo.org/archive/sc13173cl.pdf 8 http://www.sueddeutsche.de/muenchen/europaeisches-patentamt-beschaeftigte-begehren-auf-
1.1826233
The above clearly shows that – for Mr Battistelli – standards for legal recourse as defined for instance by the European Court of Human Rights do not count.
Also public observers, represented by newspapers 9 and patent attorneys’ homepages 10, come to realise that – under the presidency of Mr Battistelli – there is an absence of the rule of law at the EPO.
2. Is the proposed reform useful for the Organisation? Can the EPO examiners – in the absence of the rule of law – still correctly and consistently apply the EPC and Guidelines to patent examination? Can the EPO still fulfill its mandate of providing legal certainty to the public?
The SUEPO Central Committee recently posed a similar question:
“If the EPO is granting patent rights to inventors and European industry, how credible
are those rights if delivered by an institution that is ostensibly unable to comply with the
rule of law in its own internal affairs?” 3
Let’s try to find an answer to these questions. Mr Battistelli recently said:
“Most of our managers have not been chosen for their managerial capacities. They have been chosen because they were acknowledged experts in their field. We have to transform these managers into real managers.” 1
What does the president have in mind when he talks about “real managers”? Technical expertise is obviously no longer required. Are “real managers” expected to follow the example of our VPs and PDs, who (already) obey and blindly follow our larger-than-life president? 11 An entirely performance-based career system puts managers and employees under pressure to increase production. With the rule of law being absent, and in a working environment being dominated by fear and intimidation, not only ill-motivated managers but also weak and intimidated ones are tempted to put their subordinate employees under pressure to fulfill even the most unrealistic targets. And in the presence of threats, many of them will fulfill these expectations, while lowering the search and examination standards.
Mr Battistelli further said:
“Except an exceptional professional conscience and personal motivation, nothing incents them to work harder or to work less.” … “By opening this technical career … we will provide incentives until the very last day of their professional life.” 1
Mr Battistelli has apparently no respect for the professional attitude of EPO employees which made the European patent system a success. The EPO is not listed at the stock exchange. It is a public service provider. And blotting out professional conscience and ethics produces adverse effects. Some examiners already started distancing themselves from their work. This leads to a lower examination quality, and – consequently – to less legal certainty of the granted patents.12 A consequence of a lack of dialogue. The New Career System was developed without acknowledging receipt of, without discussing, and certainly without taking account of any of the elements and arguments of the career counterproposal of the CSC.
_____ 9 Revolte an der Isar, FAZ am Sonntag, 23.11.2014, http://www.suepo.org/public/ex14289cp.pdf 10 http://www.fosspatents.com/2014/12/european-patent-office-pays-for-health.html 11 EPO-FLIER No. 11 – “You break every rule of good man-management” 12 Patent examiners more likely to approve marginal inventions when pressed for time
If voted by the Administrative Council this week, the New Career System will be introduced without any transitional period. All current EPO staff will be exposed to a radical change of their working contract. For the examiners, this means that – due to the entirely income-based incentives – the EPO abruptly stops rewarding efforts for compliance with the EPC mandate. Being pushed by their managers, they will be forced to fulfill unrealistic targets, and many will react to this pressure by lowering their quality standards for search and examination.
Mr Battistelli can consult the spirit of the regulations whenever he runs out of arguments 7. But it would possibly lead to some irritation amongst the patent applicants if examiners – being pressed for time – would rather generally refer to the spirit of the EPC, instead of developing a sound reasoning based on the Articles and Rules of the EPC.
Mr Battistelli’s decision to introduce a fully performance-based career system has either been taken on the ground of wrong assumptions, or for ulterior motives. He still insists to introduce this system, against the will of staff, and in an environment where the rule of law is absent. It is already difficult to deliver high quality work in the current hostile working climate. If the New Career System is introduced in its current form, the EPO will no longer be able to fulfill its mandate of providing legal certainty to the public.
3. Is Mr Battistelli good for the Office, for the Organisation?
The EPO employees have already given their answer. During a staff union General Assembly held on 4 March 2014 in Munich, 750 staff members voted for the following resolution:
“The staff has lost trust in Mr Battistelli and is concerned not only about its own future, but also about the negative repercussions on the functioning of the European patent system as a whole. It has become clear that the proper performance of the tasks of the individual staff members, and therefore of the European Patent Office, is incompatible with the continuing presidency of Mr Battistelli.” 13
The answer to this question should normally be given by the members of the Administrative Council who are responsible for ensuring good governance in the Organisation. Voting for the New Career System on 11 December would implicitly confirm a mandate to the president to continue on a destructive course. At least some delegations seem to share the discomfort of staff and interested circles. And the EPO employees are not the only ones waiting for their answer. Also the stakeholders of the European patent system and others being interested in intellectual property rights expect an answer to this question 14.
The attached Open Letter to the delegations in the Administrative Council, of 5 December 2014, elaborates on the implicit change of patent law entailed in the New Career System.
The EPO-FLIER wants to provide staff with uncensored, independent information at times of social conflict.
“You break every rule of good man-management …”
In 1981, John Hoskyns, advisor to the UK Prime Minister at the time, wrote the following words to Margaret Thatcher:
You break every rule of good man-management. You bully your weaker colleagues. You criticise colleagues in front of each other and in front of their officials. They can’t answer back without appearing disrespectful … You abuse that situation. This demoralisation is hidden only from you. People are beginning to feel that everything is a waste of time. You have an absolute duty to change the way you operate.
This text will strike a chord with staff at the European Patent Office. What annoys them so much about their president is not only WHAT he is doing, but HOW he is doing it. The EPO is out there with the best when it comes to employing well-educated professionals. And yet the president1 treats this body of decent, intelligent people like fools. He is fooling no one, except perhaps the Administrative Council, but even there it looks more like he is coercing rather than convincing.
It is sickening to observe how one dictate after another is implemented, how constructive ideas are crushed and how nothing may get in the way of the leader’s will. He has not modified any proposal of any importance by as much as one word as a result of feedback from the Office’s staff representatives. For all his preaching about “social democracy”, the president does not discuss anything; in effect, his modus operandi is to ask, “Are you in favour, or do I have to threaten you (for staff), or reward you (for Administrative Council delegations)?”
Mistakes in life usually come back to haunt you. The mistakes this president is making will be no exception. He is setting a ticking time-bomb that has the potential to destroy the European Patent Office the day it explodes. Staff at the EPO understand the complexities of European politics, they understand economical arguments and they understand that change comes to any organisation that has been in operation for as long as the EPO has.
But they do NOT understand rights being taken away from them that they had as European citizens before joining the EPO. They do not understand an arrogant prima donna style of leadership based on oppression, threats, propaganda and manipulation. They do NOT understand the piece-by-piece dismantling of their working conditions without any effort to explain to them why this should be necessary. They do NOT understand what they have done that gives the president and his cohorts the right to treat them like pariahs or parasites. By his actions, Battistelli is demoralising a workforce that has served the European public with remarkable commitment and loyalty for nearly four decades. He is the catalyst for legal battles that will pass through national, and international courts, leaving a trail of unknown damage
____ 1 There is no reason in English grammar to use a capital letter at the beginning of “president”, and no moral reason either. Reverence does not come with office, but has to be deserved.
behind them. It may take ten years or more for some of the judgments in these cases to be finalised, but there will be chaos if the Office loses and is forced to wind back ten years of unacceptable behaviour and decisions. He is risking that the entire governance of the European Patent Organisation will be put into question and that the Office will be subject to political scrutiny at the highest levels. In the meantime, he, at some point, will depart, presumably to a cosy life of retirement divided between Biarritz, or some such luxury coastal town, and Paris. Behind him, he will leave an exhausted, emotionalised, demotivated staff, led by top managers who were weak under his leadership and are unlikely to find their spines back after he left.
Today, these managers – these feeble yes-men and yes-women – allow themselves to be reduced to uncritical mouthpieces, pathetically regurgitating the latest mantras coming from the tenth floor of the Isar Building and loyally toeing the party line. They repeat over and over again what they have been instructed to say, but are not able to answer any challenging questions. Can they ever regain credibility as capable managers once Battistelli is gone?
The Ivey Business Journal has a fascinating article on toxic leadership2. It says:
The real tragedy of the human condition is not that we all must die, but, rather, that we choose to live by grand illusions, rather than to face our fears. Hence, we fall into the clutches of toxic leaders who promise us the moon, knowing full well they cannot deliver. In the worst of all cases, toxic leaders fall under the spell of their own grand illusions and believe that they can.
Battistelli is worse than this. He doesn’t promise the moon; he can’t be bothered with trying to convince us, but prefers straightforward nastiness.
Some staff say they cannot afford to go on strike.
We ask:
Can staff afford NOT to go on strike?
Make this Thursday count!
Please help to distribute this flyer, especially to anyone who may still be hesitating!
EPO examiners will no longer be able to ensure appropriate quality standards
Dear Heads and members of the Member States’ delegations to the Administrative Council of the European Patent Organisation, dear Chairman, dear Mr Grandjean,
The European Commission’s Industrial Property Rights Strategy for Europe of 20081 summarises
“High quality rights are an essential requirement for all aspects of the system – support for business including SMEs, facilitation of knowledge transfer and effective enforcement of rights to combat counterfeiting and piracy. Only with a quality system can Europe benefit from new opportunities in the global economy and fulfill its responsibilities.”
The Commission had already stressed in 2006 that an innovation-friendly, modern Europe2 urgently needs “IPRs based on tough examination standards for novelty and inventive step. A low-quality patent system is a source of legal uncertainty and litigation”.
The Commission’s stated aim of strengthening IP matches the motivation and ethics of EPO examiners since 40 years. The EPO’s career systems so far have secured a predictable compensation package and career progression based on a mix of merit and seniority. This allowed examiners to focus on delivering high quality search and examination in a team effort rather than on competing for the sake of income differentiation.
The proposal for a New Career System (NCS) is a strong push for more production. Absolute production already counts more than reliable grants. Priorities are set for best effect on presentation of production to the Administrative Council (AC) rather than for serving the European public. But so far, the seniority-criterion in career-advancement gave examiners – being motivated to deliver work that adds value to society – the necessary leeway to attain reliable quality levels despite management pressure, despite insufficient IT tools and despite short-termist policy-making.
Is this about to change? The EPO’s president has already received strong support for the principle of the NCS in the Budget and Finance Committee (BFC). Are you going to decide on 11 December 2014 to introduce an entirely performance-based career proposal? This proposal is based on elements which will shift the focus of attention. Salary increases and bonuses depend only on performance. Seniority will no longer be a balancing factor. Those who do not enter into competition or fail to deliver what is defined by their manager (whose bonus is also dependent on the production achieved), will suffer economic losses. Due to the margin of discretion the examiner can apply, the level of quality is not strictly defined. Applying a higher quality level can be interpreted as excessive by the manager and can lead to a lower appreciation. Securing attractive remuneration will rely on maintaining an individual advantage in competition with colleagues, by comparison of production.
It is not as if the negative effects of such policies weren’t known. There is an abundance of academic studies on the undesired effects of performance-related pay systems on public service
motivation. It is not suitable for work requiring cognitive skills. The article (based on an US study) „Patent examiners more likely to approve marginal inventions when pressed for time”3 puts it in a nutshell. Yet, the change will still be purported to be in line with ISO 9001 for compliance with rules set by the Office. But it will not deliver quality results.
Should you decide in favour of the proposal on 11 December, examiners of the EPO
· will no longer be able to give their main attention, during prior art search and the examination of the presence of novelty and inventive step, to legal certainty of patents without directly eroding their individual remuneration and pension prospects
· will no longer be able to support the priorities of the EU by delivering high quality patents, as maintaining the required professional standards seems to be against the political will of the EPO’s president, and apparently of most of the member states
The interventions in the BFC meeting show that the delegations are not unaware of these issues. It is worrying that most of them still supported the proposal.
Low quality patents will harm business, primarily SMEs, private inventors and Universities, since the legal costs for an infringement and/or litigation procedure are so high that they normally threaten their financial foundation.
The European Commission, BusinessEurope and epi are observer delegations on the AC of the European Patent Organisation. There appeared to be declining interest amongst the observer delegations for attending AC meetings recently. The intended change in labour law is at the same time an implicit change in the (effect of) patent law. On this there should be stakeholder consultation beyond purely the members of the European Patent Organisation.
EPO staff have this year been on strong industrial action including strikes and high profile demonstrations, but Mr Battistelli seems unimpressed. EPO staff has got used to being ignored by the AC delegations. The president has now ensured that the staff’s perspective can no longer be voiced by our elected representatives during meetings of our Governing Body4. Concerned examiners had in mind to present you with a petition signed by the colleagues, but the president’s brisk pace in pushing through proposals did not allow for organising it in time for your meeting, hence this open letter.
There now is very little the EPO’s employees can do to fence off the perverse effects – of what on the surface looks like ‘only’ a change to employment conditions – on the quality of patents. Are Member States committed to the Industrial Property Rights Strategy for Europe in the framework of the Lisbon strategy for growth and jobs? If so, we fail to see how at least those amongst you also representing EU Member States could possibly vote for the NCS proposal during your meeting in Munich on 11 December.
Please do not support this quality erosion. Vote against.
The EPO-FLIER Team,
a group of concerned staff of the EPO who wish to remain anonymous due to the prevailing harsh social climate and absence of rule of law at the European Patent Office
Copies to: Competent Ministries of the Member States
President of the European Patent Office
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While open source applications specifically for the core functions of the insurance industry are still few and far between, there are a few options, such as OpenUnderwriter.
The main issue with open source is that while the software provides all the components needed for IT operations, expertise is needed to pull it all together for the business. But there’s always a good case to be made for open source, and often, this comes right from commercial IT vendors themselves. Prashant Parikh of CA Technologies, for instance, recently posted the reasons why open source makes sense.
However, and as paradoxical as it may be, I own a ZTE Open Firefox OS phone, which I use basically to check my email and calendar on the go, quickly browse a web page, and receive messages from family members.
I practically never use the function that gives the device its name (telephone), that, is, making calls. I see my phone as a tiny tablet thingie and use it as such.
But today, I had to take care of my 4-year-old daughter. It was raining and she is recovering from a bad flu, so going out was out of the question. The cable was not working, so no TV for her… which she did not really mind. But she wanted to use her computer to see her favorite videos online and we had no connection.
What to do? I used the phone as a hotspot to share its Internet connection with my laptop.
I also spent some time talking to folks about Firefox in Ubuntu and rebranding Iceweasel to Firefox in Debian (fingers crossed something will happen here in 2015). Also it was great to participate in discussions around making all of the Firefox channels offer more stability and quality to our users.
I used to be a big fan of Firefox, and I still use it for certain things. But it just doesn’t have the mindshare that it used to have back when it’s big claim to fame was being the alternative to Internet Explorer. Mobile has been where the growth is, and many mobile users have gravitated to Safari, Chrome and other browsers on their phones and tablets.
Mozilla has been staunchly opposed to an iOS version of its Firefox browser for a while. It wants to use its own web engine, but Apple will only let companies use its in-house code in the name of security. However, the organization is clearly having a change of heart — VP Jonathan Nightingale has revealed that Mozilla wants to bring Firefox to iOS. He didn’t say how it would happen, but it’s most likely that the company will use Apple’s engine and layer a custom interface on top, like Google does with Chrome. We’ve reached out to Mozilla and will let you know if it can say more.
DevAssistant 0.10.0 is sort of pre-1.0.0, so for next release, we’re planning to go from Beta to Stable. That’s a big promise, but I think at this point DevAssistant can afford that. There will be some backwards incompatible changes between 0.10.0 and 1.0.0, but after that we’ll keep things stable until 2.0.0. In addition to that, we’re planning a major GUI overhaul – basically we’ll rewrite it from scratch, since we want it to look completely different. We’re working with Mo Duffy on the design and while it’s not finished yet, some preliminary sketches can be found at Mo’s fedorapeople page.
Makers and hobbyists that enjoy building electronic projects may be interested in this pocket sized open source CMC 3-axis drawing robot called the Piccolo that can draw pictures up to 50mm square.
According to Bienkowski’s report, an Environmental Protection Agency spokesperson, Cathy Milbourn, writes that of the seven pesticides examined, “only aluminum phosphide, diazinon, and malathion are still registered and in use.” The EPA cancelled the registrations of ethylene dibromide, 2,4,5-T, dieldrin, and parathion, Milbourn said. Aluminum phosphide, diazinon, and malathion are undergoing EPA review.
China, the world’s top producer of rice and wheat, is seeking to cap the use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides that have helped to contaminate large swathes of its arable land and threaten its ability to keep up with domestic food demand.
More than 19 percent of soil samples taken from Chinese farmland have been found to contain excessive levels of heavy metals or chemical waste. In central Hunan province, more than three quarters of the ricefields have been contaminated, government research has shown.
I was disturbed to read in the Guardian that the UK government may be wavering on introducing plain packs for cigarettes. Failing to do so before the General Election would be seen as a huge victory for the tobacco companies, and have knock-on effects around the world.
[...]
As you know, what is particularly interesting about these cases is that they use the highly controversial Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) process in order to claim an indirect expropriation of property. Since the company is doing this through subsidiaries – one in Switzerland, the other in Hong Kong – it is not even clear whether those cases can proceed. However, it is evident that one of the main reasons Philip Morris is taking this route is to intimidate other countries thinking about bringing in plain packs measures. Indeed, New Zealand has put its own plans on hold pending the result of the Australian case, which shows that strategy is having its effect.
North Korea on Sunday denied claims that it had hacked into Sony Pictures, calling the allegations a “false rumor” spread by South Korea.
The U.S. film company had come under cyber attack late last month after a series of threats from North Korea for its comedy movie “The Interview,” in which the CIA plots to assassinate the country’s young leader Kim Jong-un.
A soon-to-be-released comedy film about a plot to kill North Korean leader Kim Jong-un will likely be a “blockbuster” thanks to the strong protests Pyongyang has raised about it, the U.S. human rights envoy said Friday.
On Tuesday, it appears that OEN was hacked. An article that was not submitted by an editor, not submitted through the queue and not submitted by a trusted author, was published by someone who signed up the same day. The article reported that a hacker group, Cyberberkut, had hacked the phone of a member of Joe Biden’s diplomatic entourage to Ukraine.
The anomaly– an article published outside the usual routes– led me to investigate and discover that one of the IP addresses the submitter used was associated with malware– SQL insertion, spam, even blackmail.
I checked the name of the purported author and found someone in Ukraine with that name. But the photo used in the author ID did not match. I did a reverse image search using tineye.com and there were no other copies anywhere. I hid the article and checked google Webmaster tools, which is my first go-to place to check for malware on the site. Our webmaster also checked his tracking system. No malware was detected. I had already removed one image from Reuters because it violated copyrights. Vidya removed another image that had been included and a link, because they are higher risk for SQL insertion of malware.
In 2012, Saudi Arabia’s national oil company and Qatar’s RasGas were hit by a virus known as Shamoon that damaged tens of thousands of computers. In 2013, more than 30,000 PCs at South Korean banks and broadcasting companies were hit by a similar attack by a virus dubbed DarkSeoul malware.
In July 2014 Haneen Zoabi, the first Arab Israeli woman to be elected to the Israeli legislative body, the Knesset, was banned by the Knesset Ethics Committee from all Knesset activities. As Lahav Harkov reported in October 2014, this was a direct response to her declaration that the June kidnapping of three Israeli teenagers (later found murdered) was not an act of terrorism.
[...]
They covered Zoabi’s initial suspension and followed her story of failed appeals to the Knesset and the High Court. Corporate news sources such as CNN and the New York Times, on the other hand, have not reported on any aspect of the matter, while Al-Jazeera America briefly mentions Zoabi’s suspension at the end of an article about Hamas’ terms for a ceasefire.
The infamous general overthrew Salvador Allende’s socialist Chilean government in a coup d’état in 1973 with help from classified CIA support as well as cloak-and-dagger cheerleading from distant corners of the world, Milton Friedman in Chicago and Henry Kissinger in Washington, D.C.
Lethal aid to Ukraine has been authorized by recently passed United States House Resolution 758, which calls for President Barack Obama to send both lethal and non-lethal aid to the Ukrainian military. If the U.S. Senate passes similar legislation, it’s possible Obama may choose to escalate the confrontation with Russian leader Vladimir Putin.
The American people ought to realize — and critically respond to — the dangers involved in two directions of national-security policy that their government is pursuing:
1) It is escalating the war against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (while extending its war in Afghanistan), and 2) discarding a previously espoused disarmament agenda in order to push a “massive modernization of nuclear-armed missiles, bombers and submarines,” to cost beyond $1 trillion over 30 years.
These are concerns not only of Americans. They also affect the rest of the world’s peoples.
Not only that, Mr. Aftergood found out the National Archives and Records Administration had already offered tentative approval in August of the plan to — as a spy might put it — disappear the email of every worker but the C.I.A.’s top 22 managers, three years after they left the agency.
One of Britain’s oldest oil companies BP could be about to be sold to its biggest rival for a fiver per share.
The rumoured deal, if realised, would complete one of the most ignominious falls for the once great Persian Oil company that powered Britain’s Navy to victory during the First World War.
Methane gas, a main component linked to damaging climate change, is being released in record amounts in the Four Corners region where Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and Utah meet. The Four Corners regions is one of the prime location for fracking, or hydraulic fracturing, the process of extracting natural gas from shale rock layers deep within the earth. A joint study by researchers at the University of Michigan and NASA finds that the environmental impacts of fracking are more significant than previously documented. With the help of a new satellite instrument — the European Space Agency’s SCIAMACHY — a team at University of Michigan has been able to get regional methane measurements over the entire United States back in 2009. Using this tool, they were able to identify the hotspot at the Four Corners. The footprint is so large it is visible from space.
Currently the official government measure of poverty under-represents the number of poor in the United States. The seemingly simple formula, created in the 1960s, has set the national poverty threshold for decades. Last year the official poverty threshold was about $23,600 for a family of two adults and two children. Yet our official poverty yardstick fails to recognize the difference in standards of living across the United States. Whether a family lives in Cheyenne, Wyoming or San Francisco, California, where the average housing costs are 225% higher than Cheyenne, the government standard makes no adjustment for regional variations in cost of living.
It has the Silicon Valley, Hollywood and Napa Valley wineries. It has something else, according to the Census Bureau. It’s the poorest state in the world’s largest economy.
Market Watch columnist Brett Arends wrote that China has surpassed America as the number one economy, a move he claims may lead to a collapse of U.S. political and military hegemony. But does China truly have the strongest economy in the world?
[...]
We have lived in a world dominated by the U.S. since at least 1945 and, in many ways, since the late 19th century. And we have lived for 200 years — since the Battle of Waterloo in 1815 — in a world dominated by two reasonably democratic, constitutional countries in Great Britain and the U.S.A.
The ILO report’s key chart below summarizes the key wage results of global capitalism over the last decade. Economic growth, rising real wages, and rising standards of living are the economic reality of China. Economic crisis, stagnant wages, and deepening inequalities of income and wealth are the economic realities for western Europe, the US, and Japan.
I’ve found that the conspiracy theories spread most widely — and the ones that seem plausible to many, unfortunately — are those based on current headlines and often propagated by public figures such as politicians, celebrities and media figures. They travel by word-of-mouth at light speed and become “a known fact.” These theories are often believed by those who assume there must be a coherence behind world events and occurrences don’t just happen randomly. Using that as our criteria, here are the most insidious conspiracy theories of 2014.
Though this compendium is strangely lacking in frogs or any other animals (perhaps they’re catalogued elsewhere), it is a list of the new pornography restrictions that the UK government—through the Audiovisual Media Services Regulations 2014, something I’d never heard of before today—introduced on 1 December to ‘safeguard children.’ Which is the same reason five major UK Internet service providers (ISPs) gave for blocking my own website, even though it’s more about literature, publishing, and current affairs than it is about pornography. (Most of these ISPs unblocked the site when I told them that there were no words on it that could be ‘deemed sensitive to a young audience.’)
Continuing on its recent censorship-happy path, the U.K. government amended regulations this week to prohibit online porn from depicting a variety of erotic activities. Now-illicit acts range from the very specific (female ejaculation; “spanking, caning, and whipping beyond a gentle level”) to the incredibly broad (“verbal abuse”). But basically, the U.K. has banned BDSM and certain forms of fetish porn—or at least, charging money for that sort of porn.
As you might have already heard, an act of state censorship has been declared against British pornography in the guise of innocuous regulation. But what you might not know is that it has also marked the first stage in a campaign to impose global trade sanctions. Strangely, this proposition has received less coverage.
Let us say that we have not ourselves suffered from the Censorship at all. We have never submitted, and have never been asked to submit, any article to the Press Bureau. Such censorship as has been exercised in our columns has been the purely voluntary censorship which is exercised at all times, whether in war or in peace, by every editor who has any sense of public duty, and that remark, we believe, applies to the whole British Press, daily and weekly. We have, of course, constantly asked ourselves whether it would be wise on general grounds to make this or that comment, or whether we ought to refrain from comment which we thought sound in itself because we knew or believed it to run counter to the Government view, and to be likely to interfere with their action and policy. Our feeling was that, as the Government and not we were responsible for the conduct of the war, it was our business as good citizens to support their action, even when we did not think it wise. There can be only one driver of a coach, and as long as he is on the box he must be trusted, and no effort must be made to jog his elbow or snatch at the reins. For example, there are certain things which we believe it would be to the public interest to say about foreign States, and which it would be practically impossible for the Government to suppress even under the most exaggerated interpretation of the rights of the Censor ; but these comments we have not made on the ground just given—that it is the Government who are responsible for foreign affairs, and we must not do anything which in their opinion, whether right or wrong is no matter, would injure or weaken them in the difficult task before them.
Internet users in Russia and Turkey have been subjected to the greatest increase in web censorship over the past year, according to the latest Freedom on the Net survey.
When state officials seek to censor online speech, they’re going to use the quickest and easiest method available. For many, copyright takedown notices do the trick. After years of lobbying and increasing pressure from content industries on policymakers and tech companies, sending copyright notices to take media offline is easier than ever.
The government crackdown on the media during the anti-government protest and corruption scandals of last year and the two elections this year have led to the growth of a number of independent news portals as an alternative source of information for many in Turkey.
The issue of UK citizens being stripped of their nationality has not been well covered, especially in major US news outlets. For example, since 2003 the New York Times has published only three stories on the topic, while the Washington Post, Philadelphia Inquirer, and USA Today have published just one story each, for a total of just six stories over the course of eleven years in major US newspapers. Instead, significant coverage of this issue comes from the independent sources, such as the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, which maintains an ongoing series of reports under the title, “Citizenship Revoked.”
Secretary of state John Kerry has asked Senator Dianne Feinstein to “consider” the timing of the expected release of a long-awaited report on the CIA’s harsh interrogation techniques.
The Senate Intelligence Committee, led by Dianne Feinstein of California, is soon expected to release its summary of the so-called CIA Torture Report, the committee’s four-year-long investigation into the CIA’s Bush-era torture practices. Release of the summary is the result of months of wrangling and negotiating with the White House on what would be released to the public and when—and it will likely be heavily redacted. During an interview conducted on Friday, November 21, by Esquire writer at large Scott Raab, outgoing senator Mark Udall of Colorado, who lost his reelection race on November 4, once again said that if the report is not released in a way he deems transparent, he would consider all options to make it public. In this excerpt from the interview, Raab asks Udall if he will read the document into the record on the floor of the Senate before he leaves in January, an act for which he cannot be prosecuted.
These are boom times for national security reporters, with government surveillance becoming a major topic after Edward Snowden leaked a trove of NSA documents, but one of the most well-known journalists on the intelligence beat, Siobhan Gorman of the Wall Street Journal, has decided to throw in the towel and join the Dark Side—in Gorman’s case, a global communications company called Brunswick, where she will reportedly focus on privacy and data security.
Gorman has done very solid reporting for the Journal and her previous employer, The Baltimore Sun. She has been prolific–and not just on the printed page. It turns out that she has had a lot of correspondence with the Central Intelligency Agency’s public affairs office, 246 pages of which were provided to us under a Freedom of Information Act request. We published the emails without comment earlier this year, as part of a story about reporter Ken Dilanian’s eyebrow-raising interchanges with the CIA, but in the event Gorman or her employers need a copy of her correspondence with our spymasters (perhaps the Journal has already revoked her access to its computers), we are re-upping them.
It’s colorful reading—Gorman shows a lot of interest in learning about the CIA’s gym facilities (“I was just told that the facilities at the black sites were better than the ones at CIA”), and a year to the day after the killing of Osama bin Laden she cheerily began an email to the agency by asking, “So do I wish you a ‘happy anniversary’ today’?” There’s also this mysterious missive she sent the CIA about an apparent meeting she had with an agency official: “What prompted my guest to leave so suddenly? Bat phone rang twice, and then he excused himself?” And a word of warning to her next boss at Brunswick—watch what you say, because Gorman, when asking the agency for guidance on a rumor that Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad had been killed, explained to the CIA that the info came from the editor of her paper “but his tips aren’t always accurate.”
The US Senate’s intelligence committee should release as planned its report summary on the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)’s detention and interrogation program, Human Rights Watch said today. The White House’s expressed support for the release has been undermined by statements from the State Department raising concerns over the timing of the release and possible foreign policy implications.
The 51-year-old doctor was sent to Washington by voters furious with a system that kept swelling the national debt, and anxious over what Paul sees as government zeal for war and encroachment on American civil liberties.
The full report runs 6,700 pages, covering the committee’s review of 6.2 million pages of documents from the CIA and the Defense Department. Feinstein met fierce resistance from the CIA during the entire investigation, and now with less than a week before she hands the Intelligence Committee gavel to North Carolina Republican Sen. Richard Burr, she is battling the White House over its refusal to declassify the report.
The United Nations Committee Against Torture issued a lengthy report today assessing the performance of the 156 countries whose governments have ratified the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, which took effect two decades ago.
Mass protests in New York were stretching into their third day when a new grand jury was announced on Friday. Not for the case of Eric Garner—a previous grand jury’s decision earlier this week not to indict the officer seen choking him on film before he died sparked the current protests. The latest grand jury will investigate the death of Akai Gurley, another unarmed black man who was killed by a police officer months after Garner’s death, in what the department says was an accidental shooting.
“Black lives matter” is the rallying cry of the burgeoning nationwide movement against police killings. The Associated Press (12/5/14), covering that movement, has produced a perfect example of what journalism looks like when black lives don’t matter.
[...]
Or even to make the basic medical point that being able to talk is a sign that you don’t need the Heimlich maneuver–not that you don’t need a cop to stop administering a notoriously lethal chokehold.
You don’t get any of those points in the article, because AP didn’t feel any need to quote (or, seemingly, talk to) anyone who thought that the life of Eric Garner was more important than the feelings of New York Police Department officers. Because, one has to assume, to AP black lives don’t matter.
Oh, and if you need to you can move your Kindle books over to Marvin via Calibre by removing the DRM. I, of course, do not advise you to do this one way or the other. It’s entirely your choice and may be affected by whatever the relevant laws are for that sort of thing.
Posted in Europe, Patents at 11:48 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
“That’s why I am president!” –Benoît Battistelli in self-centric mood
Summary: Battistelli’s Nixon moment and the evasive nature of his approach towards external delegations that are troubled by his behaviour
THE EPO is a rotten institution where Željko Topić, Benoît Battistelli and other cronies of theirs basically oust everyone who does not agree with them or is tasked with a process of regulation/oversight. It’s more than an attitude issue. Not to be overly dramatic here, there should be toppling, and the sooner the better. The leadership is the problem, not its many critics. See what we wrote about Battistelli overthepastfew months. We attached sensitive documents to prove or at least strongly support our allegations. Battistelli’s deputy is even worse than Battistelli and he faces many criminal charges which he is eager to hide from his colleagues. What we have currently at the EPO is "Balkan standards" (to borrow a phrase from a respected person who is familiar with the culprits). This phrase alludes to corruption and it mostly relates to Željko Topić’s actions, not just his boss and colleague, the full-of-himself “President” Battistelli (some law/patent blogs sarcastically comment on the capitalisation of the word “President”, which he seemingly deems his new first name).
Battistelli and Topić are out of control. There are numerous complaints and calls for investigation for they reign like tyrants and they are hardly even hiding it. They are wasteful (wasting European tax money) and subservient to interests other than Europe’s. No wonder their staff hates them with a passion, let aside those who have to interact with them.
Techrights is now in possession of recordings where Mr. Battistelli gets grilled by delegations (people representing part of the European Union). Techrights has studied the recordings and produced this Ogg-formatted file, which most Web browsers may automatically embed below (if not, download and playback should be possible).
The audio was recorded at a meeting with delegations of the Administrative Council (which we wrote aboutbefore).
“Those who surround him join in the response squad, suppressing the delegations or preventing them from receiving any real answers.”Apart from the megalomaniac “that’s why I am president” there is a lot of stuff worth listening to, especially the nature of the concerns raised by the delegations and the response (of lack thereof) from Battistelli, EPO President, to these. Those who surround him join in the response squad, suppressing the delegations or preventing them from receiving any real answers. The audio is full of examples of this. Just because there are ‘too many’ issues doesn’t mean that Battistelli is obliged to address none.
“At the beginning,” tells us one who listened to the recording, “one can hear an intervention of the Slovenian delegation. It says that the EPO is not a company on the stock exchange and should focus on quality and careful handling of human resources. Battistelli insults and threatens the delegation. Then, Battistelli says that the career system will make “hundreds of millions for the office” and that “the Office should not care about FR, UK and DE law” but rather think only in terms of “what is good for the office”.”
Yes, this is typical Battistelli. He is very aggressive against critics and where possible he sacks or at the very least threatens them. There is a pattern here. In future parts of this long series (guaranteed to go on well into 2015) we will show more of Battistelli’s abusive behaviour, Topić’s allegedly criminal scandals, and output from the internal uprise (there are very strong sentiments within the EPO against Topić and Battistelli and one of them is internally compared to Vladimir Putin). █
Summary: Putting in context some of the poor reporting (or whitewash) regarding Microsoft’s bribe (disguised as “partnership”) to Barnes & Noble
TECHRIGHTS sincerely regrets to report that the media is letting down the historical record, letting down facts, and ultimately letting down Free software, which has been under a massive patent attack from Microsoft since the Microsoft-Novell deal (November of 2006). While the corporate press would have us believe that Microsoft now “loves” GNU/Linux and is embracing FOSS (like a python embraces sheep maybe), the truth could not be further from that. Day after day this form of propaganda or conditioning would have us believe that white is black and black is white. It’s the same in technology as it is in politics.
Microsoft’s hatred of GNU/Linux and FOSS is best understood, objectively, by looking at Microsoft’s actions, especially backroom deals that it hides from journalists or prevents (through abuse and trolling) journalists from revealing to the public. One cannot judge an action by assessing only what the subject of scrutiny presents. Microsoft is great at media manipulation and today’s example is an excellent one. History is being rewritten before our eyes.
“Several years down the line the press suffers amnesia and something that resembles Nokia revisionism (blaming Nokia rather than Microsoft for Nokia’s demise).”Several years ago we explained why Microsoft’s ‘partnership’ with Barnes & Noble was essentiallyabribeagainst Linux. Groklaw covered this repeatedly in about half a dozen long articles. Several years down the line the press suffers amnesia and something that resembles Nokia revisionism (blaming Nokia rather than Microsoft for Nokia’s demise).
Truthfully, we have already said almost everything that there is to be said about the latest news, but the CBS-owned CNET has just published a peculiar piece with Microsoft’s statement embedded. It’s revisionism from Don Reisinger, who relays the most omissions-filled story we have found so far (no need for an extensive articles roundup here). Absolutely nothing is said about the patent battle that Microsoft tried to end as it put in jeopardy the whole racket operation that Microsoft had been running against many companies. Nothing! It makes it sound like an innocent ‘deal’ where Barnes & Noble is the loser and Microsoft is the supposed ‘rescuer’.
In our assessment, which may seem blunt, Barnes & Noble should take Microsoft to court again, both for extortion and for bribery (intended to hide the extortion and keep it going). Here is Reisinger’s ‘article’ acting as a Microsoft platform with Microsoft taking points:
“As the respective business strategies of each company evolved, we mutually agreed that it made sense to terminate the agreement,” a Microsoft spokesperson said in an e-mailed statement, providing little insignt into the decision to nix the marriage with Barnes & Noble.
Translation: we no longer needed to suppress our victim, which we had been blackmailing, so we swiftly went away, having left in tatters yet another so-called ‘partner’. We successfully completed a “divide and rule” Mafia routine, accomplishing sustainable of our profitable, fear-inducing racket.
This it was not a “partnership” as Microsoft boosters try to label it; it’s a disguise for a bribe to be passed over and stay in tact while the company dies and is no longer willing to battle Microsoft in court over the blackmail from Microsoft’s Mafia thugs.
News about the end of Microsoft’s software patent extortion schemes is being used to broadcast old talking points. OEMs big and small are ending their “deals” with Microsoft in the wake of recent US court decisions and the complete failure of Apple’s “thermonuclear” patent assault on Android. Now that we start to hear about Barnes and Noble, the Microsoft press is cranking up and people might be tempted to wade through endless chains of Microsoft nonsense. Go straight to your favorite search engine and read through Groklaw or Techrights instead.
Microsoft booster, Peter Bright, reports the end of the Barnes and Noble software patent extortion. The article is relatively fact and history free but the news has stirred up all sorts of misinformation, as is always the case when Microsoft destroys things. That’s a shame because the B&N case taught us a great deal about Microsoft’s extortion tactics and how they ruin companies.
Barnes and Noble was unusual because the company initially refused Microsoft and refused to sign a non disclosure agreement. When they fought Microsoft’s advances, they were free to tell the world what was happening. Groklaw and Techrights followed the case closely. It only ended when Microsoft paid B&N a $300 million dollar bribe to settle.
What we didn’t know was just how much Microsoft profits from its patent deals from any single vendor. Now we do. In 2013 alone, Microsoft made a billion dollars from its Samsung Android patent licensing deal alone.
What B&N really showed us is conveniently hidden behind a cloud of Microsoft press bullshit. They proved it was better to fight Microsoft’s flimsy patents and that licensing deal speculation is pure hogwash. How could anyone believe Microsoft is paid some money per device when it’s obvious that B&N was paid to shut up and no one else is talking? That’s the magic of Microsoft press perception management.
I have a feeling that the only thing keeping Microsoft out of bankruptcy is US government money. Besides the usual flow of government and big dumb company spending, we know that Microsoft got their share of “bail out” in the 2008 mortgage fraud meltdown and wealth transfer. We also know that Microsoft has been getting their share of NSA money which, of course, was carefully obfuscated in annual reports.
To summarise, Barnes & Noble is not just a victim of a Microsoft ‘partnership’. It was first the victim of Microsoft racketeering, whereupon it challenged Microsoft in court and then received a large bribe from Microsoft to allow Microsoft to carry on the racket (against companies other than Barnes & Noble).
And some say (and even insist) that Microsoft has changed…
Microsoft and the Mafia share a lot more than the first letter. █
CoreOS CEO Alex Polvi certainly got the attention of the Docker community on Monday when he announced Rocket, his company’s alternative to the Docker container file format and runtime. But just what is Rocket and what does it offer that Docker doesn’t?
LINUX IS WINNING cloud market share in the enterprise, according to the Enterprise End User Trends Report 2014 just released by the Linux Foundation.
The report was based on a survey of 774 members of the Linux Foundation’s End User Council and others by the Linux Foundation along with Yeoman Technology Group, with more than 75 percent of the large enterprises surveyed using Linux as their primary cloud platform, fewer than 24 percent of organisations primarily using Windows and less than two percent primarily using proprietary Unix.
The Linux 3.18 kernel is expected to be released this weekend and with this major update to the kernel are — as usual — an exciting number of changes and new features.
Libinput 0.7 is now available and this input library used by Wayland and other environments is nearly at feature parity to the current X Server based input stack.
Earlier this week I posted some Ubuntu 12.04 LTS vs. 14.04 LTS vs. 14.10 benchmarks that focused on the overall system performance aside from the graphics. In this article are the OpenGL results for the three releases of Ubuntu Linux for the Radeon (R600g) Gallium3D driver.
BioShock Infinite, an FPS developed by Irrational Games and published by 2K Games, might be getting a Linux release very soon. This has been revealed by the entry on the Steam database.
While many Linux gamers are waiting for Civilization: Beyond Earth to premiere for Linux, if you’re an ATI/AMD or Intel Linux graphics driver user you might be out of luck.
Earlier this week I wrote about Aspyr Media running into severe issues with the AMD and Intel Linux GPU drivers in terms of bad rendering with the Civilization: Beyond Earth game they’ve been porting to Linux. The good news is that Intel and AMD are now involved and working to get these issues resolved.
2K Games have officially announced that their much loved Bioshock Infinite will be available on Linux early next year. The first hints were picked up by a redditor, who saw new string updates to the game make multiple references to the Linux platform.
Big telecom companies like AT&T have made it clear to information-technology vendors they want more flexible options for their massive networks to meet demand for new services and lower costs. They’ve vowed to remake their networks using bare-bones computing equipment controlled by open-source software.
The CentOS project is beginning to produce monthly re-spins of CentOS 7 that contain all of the updated packages introduced this month. This new CentOS Linux rolling media approach will make it easier to install a fully-updated EL7 system with having to install just minimal updates after the installation.
As much as I love Debian, whenever I try to do anything complicated with disk partitioning, I run into trouble. Ubuntu’s Ubiquity installer is pretty good, too. But considering the bad press that Fedora/RHEL’s Anaconda installer has gotten over the past few years, once you get to know it, you can do installs very quickly and efficiently.
While many Linux users still cringe over hearing Imagination Technologies due to their shoddy Linux graphics driver history with the PowerVR series and lack of open-source friendship, their MIPS Creator CI20 development board just became available for sale and in the months ahead we’ll see how their Linux support evolves.
A Finland-based firm is offering a modular smartphone that’s simpler than Google’s Project Ara. The open-source device is slated to hit the market in the latter half of 2015.
Samsung hasn’t had much luck with the last two versions of its Galaxy phone. The company has lost market share to various competitors including Apple and Xiaomi. Now it looks like Samsung is trying to reboot its Galaxy phone franchise.
Various reports have claimed that Samsung is designing its next-gen top Android handset from scratch in an attempt to reinvent its flagship smartphone, as the previous Galaxy S5 and Galaxy S4 failed to really impress buyers. A new report from Chinese publication cnmo.com suggests that the Galaxy S6 might have already been spotted in AnTuTu, with the benchmark app having possibly revealed the phone’s specs in the process.
Open standards have driven the networking market since the earliest days of the Internet. While the use of open source for networking is a more recent phenomenon, it is no less important. A major industry transition to open source for software-defined networking (SDN) is under way, and users and vendors stand to benefit. Some expectations, however, may need to change.
While the original idea behind SDN — separating the control from the data plane in network switches — has turned out to be just one of many architectural approaches that have emerged, it did catalyze massive interest in software and open source within the networking world. Things like APIs and DevOps tools became relevant to network engineers, and open source movements emerged to fulfill the need for increased automation and flexibility as organizations moved deeper into the cloud.
These 11 machine learning tools provide functionality for individual apps or whole frameworks, such as Hadoop. Some are more polyglot than others: Scikit, for instance, is exclusively for Python, while Shogun sports interfaces to many languages, from general-purpose to domain-specific.
The Linux Foundation’s Linux.com website reports that Samsung’s open source group is now “hiring aggressively” and plans to double the size of the group in the coming years.
All of the software Negrut’s team develops will eventually be made publicly available through a website. “We believe making it all open source is the best way to ensure this transfer of technology from us to industry, where people can take advantage of the techniques and the software that we develop as part of this project, so as to foster innovation here or elsewhere in industry,” Negrut says.
The system that helps Stephen Hawking communicate with the outside world will be made available online from January in a move that could help millions of motor neurone disease sufferers, scientists said Tuesday.
Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) made another significant move within the Big Data market this week with the announcement of Haven OnDemand, which brings the data analytics and app development features of the company’s Vertica and IDOL platforms to the cloud.
The tools, which are hosted on the Helion cloud, provide access to Vertica’s data analytics functionality, as well as the capabilities of IDOL, which is designed to assist developers in building apps that leverage big data.
Mirantis is betting that ease of use and simple documentation will speed OpenStack adoption. That’s the goal behind the new “Developer Edition” of Mirantis OpenStack Express, which the company calls “the fastest and easiest way to get an OpenStack cloud.”
Citus Data, which provides an analytics database that modifies and extends PostgreSQL for scalability, is releasing an open source extension, “pg_shard,” that enables PostgreSQL to scale large datasets and operational workloads.
In October, it was discovered that Adobe had removed the link to download Adobe Reader, its proprietary PDF file viewer, for use with a GNU/Linux operating system.
While it is still possible to install Adobe Reader on GNU/Linux, Adobe’s attempts to hide access to the product for certain users is only one example of its systematic neglect of its GNU/Linux user base, and falls in line with many others as a demonstration of the importance of free software–software that no company or developer can neglect or hide. As the Windows and OSX versions of the software were developed through version 11, the GNU/Linux version was long stuck at version nine. For several years the software has lacked important features, security improvements, and support against malware attacks and other intrusions. Yet, by “locking in” Adobe Reader users and making it difficult for them to migrate to a free software PDF viewer, Adobe has, in effect, degraded the power of the PDF as a free document format, a standard the purpose of which is to be implemented by any potential piece of software and to be compatible with all. The company has abandoned the principle of program-agnostic documents, bringing about a lose-lose situation for all.
By being led to rely on the proprietary software for tasks like sharing documents and filling out forms without the option to use a free software reader in its place, entreprises, the public sector, and institutions of higher learning have also fallen victim to this neglect, all as Adobe insidiously seeks to maintain a hold on its market share. Within institutions such as government–institutions that ought not to rely on any proprietary software, to begin with–it is concerning that Adobe Reader has often been taken to be the only option for interacting with PDF files and for communicating with the electorate.
Hello, open gaming fans! In this week’s edition, we take a look at Steam Broadcasting beta, the open source Dolphin emulator, QEMU’s advent calendar, and game releases for Linux.
If the controversy over genetically modified organisms (GMOs) tells us something indisputable, it is this: GMO food products from corporations like Monsanto are suspected to endanger health. On the other hand, an individual’s right to genetically modify and even synthesize entire organisms as part of his dietary or medical regimen could someday be a human right.
This is why Ville Ylläsjärvi thinks Thingsee One, the open source, Internet of Things gadget his company is Kickstarting, will have staying power. Thingsee One isn’t just a sensor-stuffed piece of hardware, it’s a developer kit for other hardware makers. “We’re solving the hardware equation for them,” he says. “Startups can develop their solution using Thingsee One, get on with tests and pilots on the field using Thingsee One, and in many cases get their first customers using Thingsee One.”
Urgent humanitarian aid missions are slowed when cities are largely unmapped. Missing Maps aims to change that with the help of volunteer cartographers and local residents.
The latest addition to Facebook’s PHP-based Hack programming language is an interesting concept of cooperative multitasking for providing threading-like capabilities while only really executing one piece of code at a time.
Fox’s John Stossel claimed that “there is no good data showing secondhand smoke kills people,” ignoring years of studies and a 2014 Surgeon General report that determined millions of Americans have died as a result of exposure to secondhand smoke.
Monsanto has been making headway toward bringing GMOs (genetically modified organisms) into Ukraine. Former Ukraine President, Viktor Yanukovych, rejected a proposed $17 billion loan to Ukraine from the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) in late 2013, because the loan required the introduction of GMO seeds and Ukrainian law bars farmers from growing GM crops. Long considered “the bread basket of Europe,” Ukraine’s rich black soil is ideal for growing grains, and in 2012 Ukrainian farmers harvested more than 20 million tons of corn.
Six years after first being spotted in the wild, Conficker is still making its rounds online, and new research suggests that 31 percent of this year’s top threats involved the worm.
Conficker capitalizes on unpatched machines that are still running Windows XP, as well as systems operating pirated versions of Windows, according to F-Secure’s Threat Report H1 2014, which identifies the top 10 threats of the first half of 2014. The countries most at risk for the worm are Brazil, the United Arab Emirates, Italy, Malaysia and France.
A new report finds U.S. drone strikes kill 28 unidentified people for every intended target. While the Obama administration has claimed its drone strikes are precise, the group Reprieve found that strikes targeting 41 people in Yemen and Pakistan have killed more than 1,000 other, unnamed people. In its attempts to kill al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri alone, the CIA killed 76 children and 29 adults; al-Zawahiri remains alive. We are joined by Jennifer Gibson, staff attorney at Reprieve and author of the new report, “You Never Die Twice: Multiple Kills in the U.S. Drone Program.”
The fact that only 25% of airstrikes in Iraq and 5% of airstrikes in Syria are pre-planned, with the vast majority being undertaken by aircraft and drones ‘on the fly’ (i.e. when a ‘target of opportunity’ is spotted) will no doubt impact on the number of civilian casualties killed in this air war.
Locals describe Manasa as a village, but it’s little more than a complex of houses loosely clustered around an earthen courtyard at the end of a bumpy dirt track five hours from Yemen’s capital of Sanaa.
Malaysia’s former Prime Minister Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad (pix) slammed US Vice President Joe Biden for his comment on Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim’s sodomy trial in which he said that the appeal against the conviction was a chance for Malaysia to “promote confidence” in its judiciary.
“The Vice President needs to look at his own country first. In America, citizens are given life sentences and they do not even know about it, the government sentences them and uses drones to kill them.
“This is the country that is advising us about the sanctity of law? It seems that they have an ulterior motive for Anwar to become the Prime Minister,” said Mahathir.
Biden was unusually direct about his remarks on Twitter recently saying that the Malaysian government’s use of legal system & Sedition Act to stifle the opposition raises rule of law concerns.
While saddened by the news out of Ferguson, Missouri this past week, I am not surprised. Once again an unarmed black teen was shot dead by an “other than” black man, and the legal industry was used to exonerate the killer. I say legal industry, because it is no longer a system of due process and equal protection, and no longer seeking justice. It is merely an industry which allows experts and insiders to use the law to further their own agenda.
A suspected US drone strike in Yemen killed nine alleged al-Qaida militants early on Saturday, a security official said, as authorities continue their search for an American photojournalist held by the extremists.
Why has so much journalism succumbed to propaganda? Why are censorship and distortion standard practice? Why is the BBC so often a mouthpiece of rapacious power? Why do the New York Times and the Washington Post deceive their readers?
Why are young journalists not taught to understand media agendas and to challenge the high claims and low purpose of fake objectivity? And why are they not taught that the essence of so much of what’s called the mainstream media is not information, but power?
These are urgent questions. The world is facing the prospect of major war, perhaps nuclear war – with the United States clearly determined to isolate and provoke Russia and eventually China. This truth is being turned upside down and inside out by journalists, including those who promoted the lies that led to the bloodbath in Iraq in 2003.
The times we live in are so dangerous and so distorted in public perception that propaganda is no longer, as Edward Bernays called it, an “invisible government”. It is the government. It rules directly without fear of contradiction and its principal aim is the conquest of us: our sense of the world, our ability to separate truth from lies.
It is estimated that enough electromagnetic radiation will be emitted to melt human eye tissue and cause breast cancer, not to mention the damage to the environment and wildlife on lands ostensibly under federal protection. The Growler planes employ electronic technology to jam enemy radar. Navy officials aim to fly training programs over U.S. lands some 260 days a year. As Jamail writes, “What is at stake is not just whether the military is allowed to use protected public lands in the Pacific Northwest for its war games, but a precedent being set for them to do so across the entire country.”
Typhoon Hagupit began battering the Philippines late Saturday, with strong winds and rain expected to pummel a central belt of the island nation for days as the storm churns westward.
Hundreds of thousands of people had been evacuated from dangerous coastal areas ahead of its landfall. While weaker than the devastating typhoon that killed more than 7,000 people in November last year, Hagupit is the most powerful storm to hit the country in 2014.
Three years ago, thanks to its enterprising president, the Maldives was leading a global climate change response. Now, that president is out of office, living under armed guard, and watching his country wilt under the threat of extremism and rising sea levels
At least two people have been killed after Typhoon Hagupit made landfall in east of the Philippines, authorities in the country say.
The category three storm, which is tracking north-west across the central Philippines, brought intense rain and strong winds, threatening to wreak more destruction in areas still bearing the scars of 2013′s Super Typhoon Haiyan.
George Osborne has sparked the biggest boom in UK fossil fuel investment since the North Sea oil and gas industry was founded in the 1970s. Analysis of new Treasury data also shows investment in clean energy has plummeted this year and is now exceeded by fossil fuels, while road and airport building is soaring.
THE VATICAN’S ACCOUNTS czar said last night that he had stumbled across hundred of millions of euros “tucked away” in various accounts, describing the windfall as a relic of the papacy’s medieval but soon-to-be reformed financial set-up.
“We have discovered that the (Vatican’s financial) situation is much healthier than it seemed,” the Australian cardinal Pell told Britain’s Catholic Herald.
Russia has warned BuzzFeed that it will ban access to the entire site over a post published on Wednesday about a deadly gunfight in the capital of Chechnya.
BuzzFeed received an email on Friday from Roskomnadzor, Russia’s federal communications agency, saying that the post “contains appeals to mass riots, extremist activities or participation in mass (public) actions held with infringement of the established order.” It cited statutes laid out by the prosecutor general’s office and said access to the site “is restricted by communications service providers in the territory of the Russian Federation.” It has given BuzzFeed 24 hours to remove the post or face a total ban.
A significant portion of British citizens are currently blocked from accessing the Chaos Computer Club’s (CCC) website. On top of that, Vodafone customers are blocked from accessing the ticket sale to this year’s Chaos Communication Congress (31C3). [1]
Since July 2013, a government-backed so-called opt out list censors the open internet. These internet filters, authorized by Prime Minister David Cameron, are implemented by UK’s major internet service providers (ISPs). Dubbed as the “Great Firewall of Britain”, the lists block adult content as well as material related to alcohol, drugs, smoking, and even opinions deemed “extremist”.
Did you ever wonder what A Christmas Carol might look like if the NSA wrote it during the Cold War? And replaced all the characters with Communist icons? Well wonder no longer!
The Fall/Winter 1987-1988 issue of NSA’s internal magazine Cryptological Quarterly made all your dreams come true. Karl Marx plays the role of Uncle Scrooge, Stalin and Lenin play the Ghosts of Communism Past, and Mikhail Gorbachev stands in for the Ghost of Communism Future.
After the Senate’s failure to pass sweeping National Security Agency reforms last month, the Obama administration could pursue the 90-day renewal of the agency’s bulk phone spying program, which expires Friday.
President Obama has a Friday deadline to decide whether to halt his NSA phone-snooping program or to keep it going, and after Congress failed to stop it last month some lawmakers now say the White House should pull the plug on its own.
The National Security Agency (NSA), a US intelligence agency, has access to all Pakistani mobile phone operators that enables agency to access and monitor voice, SMS, location and data transactions of each and every Pakistani mobile phone user in Pakistan and abroad.
The NSA’s far-reaching powers have been further detailed in an extensive report from The Intercept, which reveals that the agency has conducted an advanced spying operation for years in an effort to spy on mobile operators working on phone encryption. The operation reportedly also targeted bodies that oversee telecom standards, in order to stay updated on new security protocols and identify or even insert vulnerabilities into those communication networks it wanted access to.
GCHQ and the NSA tracked and spied on innocent employees and tapped into regulatory firms into order to break into the world’s most popular mobile phone networks.
The National Security Agency has spied on hundreds of companies and groups around the world, including in countries allied with the US government, as part of an effort designed to allow agents to hack into any cellular network, no matter where it’s located, according to a report published Thursday.
While many upcoming technologies promise to protect privacy and keep sensitive information safe in a world that’s becoming increasingly connected, the National Security Agency (NSA) has ways of bypassing even the most protected systems in order to have constant access to the inner workings of governments, organizations and even people’s lives.
The NSA has worked for years to hack into cellphone networks worldwide, trying to bypass and undermine their security, according to Edward Snowden documents revealed by The Intercept on Thursday.
A German parliamentary inquiry has been told that German intelligence fed America’s NSA filtered data from an Internet hub in Frankfurt, after clearance from Berlin. The “Eikonal” project ended in 2008.
One of the striking features of the responses to Edward Snowden’s leaks about the snooping being carried out by the NSA and GCHQ is the insistence that everything is, of course, quite “legal.” But gradually, it has emerged that this “legality” is achieved through the use of loophole after loophole after loophole after loophole. Now it has been revealed that Germany’s intelligence agency, the BND, has also been using this trick to enable it to spy on its own citizens — something that was assumed to be off-limits for it…
The role of investigative journalists remains crucial in holding power to account, even when that power is ‘incompetent’, according to veteran reporter Seymour Hersh.
The National Security Agency should have an unlimited ability to collect digital information if it would help protect the nation against terrorism and other threats, a federal judge says.
The U.S. National Security Agency should have an unlimited ability to collect digital information in the name of protecting the country against terrorism and other threats, an influential federal judge said during a debate on privacy.
The UK’s Investigatory Power Tribunal (IPT), has today ruled that authoritative bodies tapping major internet cables in the UK is a legal practice and is not in breach of human rights.
The UK’s Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT) ruled Friday that GCHQ’s mass surveillance TEMPORA program is legal … in principle.
The IPT said that (again, in principle) British spooks are entitled to carry out mass surveillance of all fibre optic cables entering or leaving the UK under the 2000 RIPA law.
The latest leaks by Edward Snowden has revealed that British intelligence agency General Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) hacked into two major undersea cables owned by Reliance Communications compromising millions of users sensitive information, including those from the Indian government. The hack took place sometime between 2009 and 2011 with the help of private company Cable and Wireless, which is now owned by telecom major Vodafone since 2012, Hindustan Times reports.
Two major undersea cables belonging to Reliance Communications were hacked by General Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), a British intelligence company, sometime between 2009 and 2011.
Internet freedom suffered this year as a growing number of countries stepped up efforts to spy on users and censor online postings, a global survey showed Thursday.
An NSA encryption box that secures the US military’s global drone network has become the focus for UK officials deciding whether a telecoms contractor should be pulled up under international rules on corporate ethics.
British Telecommunications Plc, which faces a formal investigation of its contract to supply part of the US military network, told UK officials they should disregard the NSA encryptor and drop the case.
It had been cited in evidence by legal charity Reprieve, in a bid to make BT meet an obligation to assess whether it was responsible for human rights atrocities after supplying part of the network the US has used to target a calamitous drone assassination programme against suspected armed opponents of its military offensives in the Middle East.
The news broke quietly in the Danish press the Saturday before the U.S. midterm elections last month: according to documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, a spy from Britain’s most secretive intelligence agency, GCHQ, went disguised as a UK delegate to the 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, and another was deployed to the UN’s Cancun climate talks in 2010. This followed news last winter that the NSA also spied on the Copenhagen negotiations.
House lawmakers are attempting to revive a popular bill that would limit the National Security Agency’s ability to spy on Americans’ communications data, a day after the measure was left out from ongoing government funding negotiations.
The only NSA reform amendment to pass either congressional chamber since 2013′s mass spying revelations became public has reportedly been cut from the “Cromnibus” spending bill that is currently under consideration in the final days of Congress’ lame-duck session, according to U.S. News & World Report.
An amendment to prevent “backdoor” surveillance of Americans by the National Security Agency was embraced by more than 70 percent of voting House members on June 19.
But the veto-proof 293-123 win for the Lofgren-Massie amendment apparently was not large enough to convince congressional leaders to include it in the so-called “CRomnibus” spending bill that will be considered in the remaining days of Congress’ lame-duck session.
One of the Senate’s biggest critics of the National Security Agency’s (NSA) contentious spying programs wants President Obama to make drastic reforms himself, after a congressional plan was blocked on the Senate floor last month.
An appeals court will hear oral arguments in Smith v. Obama, a case filed by an Idaho nurse against the Nation Security Agency’s controversial telephone data collection program, in Seattle on Monday, Dec. 8.
We all worry about digital spies stealing our data – but now even the things we thought we were happy to share are being used in ways we don’t like. Why aren’t we making more of a fuss?
The paperwork has shown two cases where federal prosecutors have cited the All Writs Act – which was enacted in 1789 as part of the Judiciary Act – to force companies to decrypt information on gadgets.
Grand juries were designed to be a check on prosecutors and law enforcement. Instead, they’ve become a corrupt shield to protect those with power and another sword to strike down those without. And it’s now all too obviously past time the system was overhauled to fix that.
The Royal Navy will set up a permanent base in Bahrain, to the dismay of human rights campaigners who say the base is a “reward” for the British’s government silence over torture, attacks on peaceful protesters and arbitrary detention in the tiny kingdom.
In the six and a half minutes after Peter Liang discharged a single bullet that struck Gurley, 28, he and his partner couldn’t be reached, sources told the Daily News. And instead of calling for help for the dying man, Liang was texting his union representative. What’s more, the sources said, the pair of officers weren’t supposed to be patrolling the stairways of the Pink Houses that night.
Salaita, who was set to begin a tenured position at Illinois this fall, had his job offer retracted after a number of donors, students and faculty at the school contended that he was anti-Semitic.
Nobody’s willing to say it yet. But after Ferguson, and especially after the Eric Garner case that exploded in New York yesterday after yet another non-indictment following a minority death-in-custody, the police suddenly have a legitimacy problem in this country.
Ramsey Orta — who recorded the July 17 incident in which Officer Daniel Pantaleo put Eric Garner in a chokehold shortly before he died on his cellphone — told the Daily News the grand jury ‘wasn’t fair from the start,’ and claims his testimony only lasted 10 minutes. ‘I think they already had their minds made up,’ he said.
In the words of Motoring Enthusiast Party Senator Ricky Muir, the upper house was faced with a choice between a “bad decision or a worse decision”. He opted for what he decided was the former, and gave the government the final vote it needed for the controversial Migration and Maritime Powers Legislation Amendment bill to pass the Senate, 34 votes to 32. The amended legislation was then rushed through the House of Representatives, which was due to have its final sitting day of the year on Thursday, but returned on Friday to pass it into law in just 12 minutes.
A march through central Athens to mark the sixth anniversary of the fatal police shooting of an unarmed teenager quickly turned violent Saturday, as marchers damaged store fronts and bus stations, and set fire to clothes looted from a shop.
Clashes also broke out between police and demonstrators marching through the northern city of Thessaloniki. At night, police fired tear gas and stun grenades after a crowd of marchers beat up two plainclothes policemen there.
For more than 20 days now, 21-year-old anarchist Nikos Romanos has been on hunger strike, demanding prison leave to attend lectures after he passed university entrance exams.
Two members of Theresa May’s panel inquiring into child sex abuse are facing calls to resign after being accused of sending threatening or insulting emails to victims who had criticised the inquiry.
Lawyers for one abuse survivor have written to the home secretary to complain of a string ofunsolicited communications, including an allegedly threatening email sent two days before an official meeting that both panellists and an abuse survivor were due to attend.
Michael Brown’s family, on the night of the Ferguson grand jury decision, called for all police in the United States to wear body cameras.
Mayor Bill de Blasio, in announcing that some of New York’s police officers would begin wearing them, said “body cameras are one of the ways to create a real sense of transparency and accountability.”
And on Monday, President Obama said he would request $75 million in federal funds to distribute 50,000 body cameras to police departments nationwide, saying they would improve police relations with the public.
Secretary of State John Kerry personally phoned Dianne Feinstein, chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Friday morning to ask her to delay the imminent release of her committee’s report on CIA torture and rendition during the George W. Bush administration, according to administration and Congressional officials.
[...]
But those concerns are not new, and Kerry’s 11th-hour effort to secure a delay in the report’s release places Feinstein in a difficult position: She must decide whether to set aside the administration’s concerns and accept the risk, or scuttle the roll-out of the investigation she fought for years to preserve.
Your provider has a monopoly on the wire. You have to use their Internet, their broadband, their cable service vs having a choice of providers. If they don’t want to make a deal so you can watch what you want, since they control your selection, their priority is your loss; their fast lane is, well, your you-can’t-get-what you-want lane.
Posted in Europe, Patents at 8:04 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Patent institution of Europe is showing signs of tear as protests intensify and suppression of these protests — as well as suppression of investigation — intensifies as well
THE corrupt EPO is facing backlash and there are several internal protests these days (we will cover these in another post). More insiders are coming to us with evidence, showing quite clearly that even those within the institution recognise the severe problems. Nothing demonstrates this better than Battistelli’s actions as covered the other day by IPKat. Battistelli, who already destroyed someregulatory/oversight structures, has just ousted part of the Investigation Unit. To quote IPKat: “In recent posts here and here Merpel has been spreading the word concerning the increasing disquiet and anxiety felt by her and many others regarding the running of the European Patent Office, its staff relations, finances and other issues. These posts, as well as those that preceded them, have generated a considerable amount of interest among readers, and a large email postbag from users of the Office from across the globe — though to her sadness neither she nor the IPKat have yet received so much as a peep from any of the members of the European Patent Organisation’s Administrative Council [even though she knows that quite a number of them are subscribers to this weblog].
“Merpel’s disquiet is moving up a gear now, since she has since learned that a Board of Appeal member has just been suspended from office and escorted from the building. Apparently the ground of suspension is alleged misconduct and the EPO’s Investigation Unit has been instructed to examine the matter. Merpel’s intelligence reveals that the suspension (technically a “house ban”, she believes, but with the same functionality as a suspension) was ordered by none other than President Battistelli himself. Now there is a structure for dealing with alleged misconduct on the part of Board of Appeal members — but there are also checks and balances in place. One such check is that the power to suspend Board of Appeal members lies in the hands of the Administrative Council and not the President: if this were not the case, we would have the executive branch of the EPO having effective control of the judiciary — a dangerous and undesirable situation.”
Battistelli is trying to scare his staff, but it won’t be long before they topple him. We welcome EPO staff to safely disclose information to us. We have never let a source down or failed to protect a source’s identity. █
Summary: A reminder of the fact that Microsoft actively and even illegally challenges the adoption of GNU/Linux
TECHRIGHTS agrees with Christine Hall (FOSS Force) nearly all the time, except when it comes to DRM and this new piece which downplays Microsoft’s threat to FOSS. A lot of people foolishly choose to believe that Microsoft has changed, but all that has changed is Microsoft’s public face. The lawsuits, the abuses, the sabotage etc. continue to this day and so do the AstroTurfing tactics. We cover a lot of examples and we occasionally show that Microsoft is worse and more abusive than before. It just hides it better from many more people. It’s about visibility.
A lot of people seem to have forgotten (or are not taking for granted) that Microsoft extorts GNU/Linux. It’s not just about Android but also SUSE, which is busy bribing its critics to create positive coverage for itself (we don’t know if Bryan Lunduke too was bribed, but we know about several others). Microsoft is still a powerhouse of media manipulation, owing to PR agencies that it has harassing journalists. Let’s look at a timely example. If you criticise the CBS-owned ZDNet (technology propaganda site) in any of its sites over its propaganda pact with Microsoft, then they will censor (delete) your comments. It’s about visibility; even its pact with Microsoft is hard to come by. As we have shown before, there is a rogue relationship there, with staff that works for ZDNet and Microsoft simultaneously, commenters who anonymously post from Microsoft, commenters whom Microsoft is paying, etc. ZDNet is so utterly determined to spew out Microsoft propaganda that it hires Microsoft staff, publishes ads as “articles”, and even resorts to bullying innocent people (women too) who write negative reviews about Microsoft-branded products (yes, Ed Bott has just done that too). Microsoft Jack is now fudging numbers to make the utterly terrible Vista 8 (worst ever Windows) look like a “success”. Well, that’s ZDNet: Veiled advertising/agenda disguised as “news” from Microsoft boosters like Ed Bott et al. as well as past and present Microsoft staff. But it’s not just ZDNet though. Look who advertises Microsoft in AOL articles. Yes, it’s still Sarah Perez, who does not disclose her past salaries from Microsoft. This is just one aspect among many which remind us of Microsoft’s exceptional evil, witch-hunting critics of its products, firing (or causing the firing) of critics, and injecting propaganda into the media. There has been a big dispute over at Twitter about this. ZDNet is finally receiving some heat.
“This is just one aspect among many which remind us of Microsoft’s exceptional evil, witch-hunting critics of its products, firing (or causing the firing) of critics, and injecting propaganda into the media.”Over at Condé Nast, Microsoft Peter is now covering the Microsoft-Barnes & Noble ‘deal’, which was essentiallyabribeagainst Linux. As Jim Lynch correctly pointed out: “Suspicious minds might think that Microsoft cut the deal just to shut Barnes and Noble up about the patent issues involved. After all, it would have been very tough for a company like Barnes and Noble to say no to $300 million dollars from Microsoft. Who cares about patents when you get handed that kind of cash?”
Yes, it was a bribe. We said it all along. They just don’t call it “bribe”, they rename it. As for Microsoft’s rival to Android, it is pretty much dead. As IDG put it the other day: “The first three Windows Phone versions were pathetically backward compared to iOS and Android, but Windows Phone 8.1 — whose release began this summer in a series of fits and starts based on carriers’ and device makers’ whims — started to make Windows Phone a credible platform. However, buyers don’t seem impressed. Maybe they’ve given up on Windows Phone after four years of ineptitude; maybe they’re waiting for next year’s Windows 10, which Microsoft says this time — we promise! — will be really good (as it always does).
“Whatever the reason — and despite Microsoft making the Windows Phone OS free for smartphone makers last winter, to boost adoption — Windows Phone’s market share is shrinking.
“But Windows Phone’s issues aren’t merely the state of the mobile OS. Jan Dawson, principal analyst at Jackdaw Research, has analyzed Windows Phone and in a report released today has concluded that the platform is unlikely to rebound. Dawson is not a partisan of any platform, so his conclusions carry serious weight.
“Windows Phone is in a downward spiral — without a strong underlying operating system, developers can’t create compelling apps. Without a reasonable market share, developers won’t create reasonable apps, even if the OS supports them. Without a compelling device, OS, and app combination, users won’t buy Windows Phone in any significant quantities, so developers have no incentive.”
The amazing thing is that Microsoft managed to impose this garbage on mobile giant Nokia, this time too using a bribe (to Nokia and to Elop), derailing the company’s huge Linux push. Elop, according to this new analysis from Ahonen, was the worst Nokia CEO of all time and this was part of the plan because “Elop had a personal bonus clause that rewarded him for destroying the Nokia handset business.” Here is an expanded quote from Ahonen:
Elop wiped that all out with a rampage of destroying Nokia. Three years after the new Windows Phone based Lumia smartphones were released, Nokia’s smartphone market share was down to 3%. Yes Elop had managed to wipe out nine out of ten customers for the most loyal dumbphone customer base on the planet and the second highest loyalty smartphone brand (behind only iPhone). It was kterally a world record in market leader destruction. No industry has ever seen this rapid collapse of its market leader, not even under catastrophic conditions like Toyota’s brakes failures in cars, or from sheer management stupdity before like Coca Cola’s launch of New Coke. Never has any company collapsed its global leadership position as fast as Elop demolished Nokia. And note, when Toyota hit its brakes or Coca Cola decided to go New, they were not twice as big as their nearest rival. Nokia’s smartphone unit was more than twice as big as Apple in smartphones, and the unit was four times as big as Samsung’s smartphone business. (PS we found out after he was ousted from Nokia’s CEO job as the shortest-duration biggest failure Nokia CEO of all time, that Elop had a personal bonus clause that rewarded him for destroying the Nokia handset business… yeah, irony of ironies. The Financial Times calculated that Elop was rewarded an extra 1.5 million dollars for every biillion dollars he wiped out of Nokia shareholder value. The FT compared Elop’s heist with the worst of Wall Street criminals like Bernie Madoff)
If you thought the Windows Phone strategy was right but Nokia was just inept at implementing it, nobody should be able to do it better than Microsoft. So now we have six months of Microsoft ownership of Nokia’s handset business. How is the smartphone business? The Lumia business market share under full Microsoft control now is… 3%. And mind you, in four years since Elop announced his Windows strategy the Nokia smartphone business has not managed one quarter of a profit. Yes now its been 18 quarters straight, launching Lumia, launching Windows Phone 8, and switching ownership from Nokia to Microsoft and nothing helped. Not one quarter of profit. The Microsoft handset business dream is utterly dead.
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But what Microsoft did not want, when it spent 7 billion dollars to buy Nokia’s handset business, is to see Nokia compete against it. The exclusive licence to the Nokia brand was a long term thing for dumbphones but only a short-term thing for smartphones (and apparently, tablets). Nokia already pulled a dirty trck on Microsoft when it launched the short-lived X series that ran on Android. Microsoft killed off that project soon after they took over the handset business this year. But that was further confusion to the minds of consumers on what is the ‘Nokia’ (brand) intending to do. Is that Windows Phone -thingy, the whats-it-called-operation-system is it viable or not. If Nokia already launches on Android. So yeah, Microsoft had to kill it.
Now Microsoft has stopped using the Nokia branding on its newest smartphones. They are just branded Microsoft Lumia. And just months later, appears a brand new Nokia branded gadget, a tablet. This.. running Android. Even before we hear any rumors of a Nokia branded smartphone again from Finland, this is bad news for Microsoft’s tablet strategy.
Will the N1 Tablet sell in enough numbers to show any relevance to Nokia’s business? No, of course not. It will be the squeak of a mouse in the noise of a thunderstorm, but it is Nokia’s first salvo. It does signal first of all, that Nokia wants to return. Secondly, it signals the total break from Windows. If any device by Finland’s ‘real’ Nokia made sense to do on Windows, more than a smartphone, that would be a tablet. That Nokia now clearly spits in the eye of its ‘partner’ Microsoft, and does the tablet on Android is clear signal, Nokia is finished with Windows. For good. Forever.
To all those who so hastily claim that Microsoft is no longer against GNU/Linux (and by extension FOSS) or is no longer criminal, well… check the facts more carefully. The worst thing is becoming unable to recognise that who is attacking you in various ways, usually by proxy. █
ONE of our readers sent us some interesting reports about Steve Jobs’ rudeness [1], determination to attack Android/Linux with patents [2], and a lawsuit [3] over DRM [4] where Steve Jobs’ ghost is back to haunt digital freedom.
“He also started a wave of patent abuses, ranging from threats (like those veiled threats against Palm) to lawsuits that would last several years and drain budgets, remove features, etc.”Over the years we have criticised Steve Jobs (before and after his death) because his contribution to DRM — contrary to what Apple fans care to admit — has been great. He also started a wave of patent abuses, ranging from threats (like those veiled threats against Palm) to lawsuits that would last several years and drain budgets, remove features, etc. So much for innovation, eh?
We continue to reject the notion that just because someone is dead it should be impossible to criticise him or her, especially if that person is a public figure (like a politician). Sadly, however, some people disagree and want to treat any criticism of Jobs like blasphemy or “speaking ill of the dead” (inducing censorship). As the reports below serve to show, Jobs does not deserve to be treated as though he was a hero, except perhaps by those who cherish corporate control over people, using digital means (that’s why the corporate press loves to idolise Jobs so much). █
Emails sent by Jobs have surfaced once again in a class action lawsuit brought against Apple (AAPL, Tech30) for making iTunes the exclusive store for iPod music. Jobs’ emails are characteristically frank, which could hurt Apple.
Jobs’ famous candor wasn’t limited to face-to-face encounters. His brusque manner translated to email as well. That’s unusual for modern CEOs, who are trained to exercise restraint in emails. Those words can easily be entered as evidence in a trial.
Either Jobs didn’t get that message — or he didn’t care. These 10 emails from Apple’s co-founder reveal the stern, outspoken and often witty personality that made him one of the most charismatic CEOs of his era.
Anyone who follows the smartphone and tablet market knows that Android has become the No. 1 mobile operating system in the world. They also know that, prior to his death in 2011, Steve Jobs was not very happy about Google’s mobile operating system. In fact, he made a rather bold threat when he talked about his dislike of this competing mobile OS.
“I will spend my last dying breath if I need to, and I will spend every penny of Apple’s $40 billion in the bank, to right this wrong. I’m going to destroy Android, because it’s a stolen product. I’m willing to go thermonuclear war on this,” the late CEO famously said.
This morning, Apple will begin a duel over claims that it used copy-protection schemes known as “digital rights management,” or DRM, to illegally manipulate the market for iPods. The lawsuit, filed nearly 10 years ago, puts some legal firepower behind activists’ claims that the copy-protection DRM is “defective by design.”
A look at some of the latest spin and the latest shaming courtesy of the patent microcosm, which behaves so poorly that one has to wonder if its objective is to alienate everyone
In defiance of common sense and everything that public officials or academics keep saying (European, Australian, American), China's SIPO and Europe's EPO want us to believe that when it comes to patents it's "the more, the merrier"
The problem associated with Battistelli's strategy of increasing so-called 'production' by granting in haste everything on the shelf is quickly being grasped by patent professionals (outside EPO), not just patent examiners (inside EPO)
Free/Open Source software in the currency and trading world promised to emancipate us from the yoke of banking conglomerates, but a gold rush for software patents threatens to jeopardise any meaningful change or progress
To nobody's surprise, the past half a decade saw accelerating demise in quality of European Patents (EPs) and it is the fault of Battistelli's notorious policies
New trouble for Željko Topić in Strasbourg, making it yet another EPO Vice-President who is on shaky grounds and paving the way to managerial collapse/avalanche at the EPO
The utter lack of participation, involvement or even intervention by German authorities serve to confirm that the government of Germany is very much complicit in the EPO's abuses, by refusing to do anything to stop them
Another example of UPC promotion from within the EPO (a committee dedicated to UPC promotion), in spite of everything we know about opposition to the UPC from small businesses (not the imaginary ones which Team UPC claims to speak 'on behalf' of)
Uploaded by SUEPO earlier today was the above video, which shows how last year's party (actually 2015) was spoiled for Battistelli by the French State Secretary for Digital Economy, Axelle Lemaire, echoing the French government's concern about union busting etc. at the EPO (only to be rudely censored by Battistelli's 'media partner')
In violation of international labour laws, Team Battistelli marches on and engages in a union-busting race against the clock, relying on immunity to keep this gravy train rolling before an inevitable crash
A new year's reminder that the EPO has only one legitimate union, the Staff Union of the EPO (SUEPO), whereas FFPE-EPO serves virtually no purpose other than to attack SUEPO, more so after signing a deal with the devil (Battistelli)
Orwellian misuse of terms by the EPO, which keeps using the term "social democracy" whilst actually pushing further and further towards a totalitarian regime led by 'King' Battistelli
The paradigm of totalitarian control, inability to admit mistakes and tendency to lie all the time is backfiring on the EPO rather than making it stronger
An outline of recent stories about patents, where patent quality is key, reflecting upon the population's interests rather than the interests of few very powerful corporations
The role played by Heiko Maas in the UPC, which would harm businesses and people all across Europe, is becoming clearer and hence his motivation/desire to keep Team Battistelli in tact, in spite of endless abuses on German soil
The latest facts and figures about software patents, compared to the spinmeisters' creed which they profit from (because they are in the litigation business)